It almost goes without saying that there is no excuse for not paying a legal minimum. The defence offered by one of the latest care employers to be named and shamed, East Midlands Crossroads – Caring for Carers, that the rules are “complex, in parts ambiguous and open to interpretation”, does not sound good. Better to own up and write the cheque.

A survey by the UKHCA found the average rate across the UK was £13.66 an hour, with Liverpool and neighbouring Knowsley councils paying less than £11. “Ultimately, the care market will become commercially unsustainable,” the association warns, a conclusion that some operators have already reached. The Saga group, for instance, is seeking to sell its Allied Healthcare business, one of the biggest homecare providers, having bought it only as recently as 2011.

For its part, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass) says that paying the UKHCA’s £15.74 would cost an extra £342m a year in England, “which would require us to make very serious further cuts in parts of the adult social care service”. Although money could be switched from other budgets or raised through council tax – they have a point.

When sector leaders gather on Thursday at the annual conference of Skills for Care, the workforce development body for adult social care, the talk is likely to be about an even stiffer potential bill, however. For the looming general election is raising the prospect of a Labour-led government encouraging or incentivising the payment of the living wage to workers on public services contracts, currently £7.85 an hour, or £9.15 in London, as against the £6.50 minimum wage for employees aged 21 or over.

With perfect timing, the Resolution Foundation thinktank has done some sums. Calculating that two in three of 1.4 million “frontline” care workers in the UK are paid below the living wage, it reckons it would cost a cool £2.3bn a year to bring them all up to that level – not counting £142m needed to end non-compliance with the minimum wage.

But this number is not the total bill for the public sector as £900m can be taken off for the cost of care paid for privately. And if the knock-on reduction in benefits and increased income tax revenues of paying the living wage is factored in, the total cost to the taxpayer would be a much more palatable £726m. Moving towards full living wage payment over five years could start in 2015-16 for £250m, the foundation says.

Laura Gardiner, co-author of the foundation’s report on the costs, may be forgiven the slight exaggeration when she says that these figures “pale into insignificance” compared to the billions being proposed by all three main political parties to raise NHS spending.

Some politicians do get the case for boosting sharply the rewards for those who deliver professional care to our ageing population: better-quality recruits who make the job a career; lower turnover rates; and improved care outcomes that help keep older and disabled people out of hospital and residential homes. Care minister Norman Lamb said at the report’s launch that he felt it made a “pretty compelling” argument.